Five Fantastic Songs By Holly Golightly, Who Is Playing NYC Tonight And Tomorrow

The voice of Holly Golightly--a British singer who first entered the music world as a member of Thee Headcoatees, the all-lady spinoff of Thee Headcoats, and who has also lent her vocals to songs by Rocket From The Crypt and the White Stripes--is a whiskey-soaked marvel, communicating pain and suffering with something as simple as a drawn-out vowel. She mostly operates in the idiom of AM-radio-ready rock from the '50s and '60s--feedback-laden riffs that are sliced in two by single-string solos, breezy drumming--but her voice, which can veer from mournful to snappy in a single measure, takes all of her material to a sometimes devastatingly current place.Tonight, her duo the Broke-Offs plays at Mercury Lounge; tomorrow, the Knitting Factory. Get familiar with five great songs from her very large catalog, after the jump.

This track, from the new album No Help Coming, is a woozy, kind of creepy track, drenched in bending guitars and a ton of feedback. Holly's voice here takes on a slightly sinister cast as she sings of haunting a lover who spurned her, threatening to be in his shadow forever.

This track, on which Holly is backed by the Cincinnati garage-rock outfit The Greenhornes, appeared on the soundtrack to Broken Flowers, and it's another example of her voice lending just the right touch of cracked-heart mystique to a slightly mournful rock song.

This 1995 slow burner echoes Wreckless Eric's lovelorn "Whole Wide World," but it's one of the best songs about post-breakup self-determination to be put to tape. Don't save it for the next time you're waiting to get over someone, though; its growled-out chorus and deceptively simple structure make for satisfying listening even on days when you're happy in the real world.